Calendar Anorexia

DEBORAH CROMBIE: The last six weeks or so my life have been overly full of STUFF. Mostly necessary, unavoidable stuff, starting with the fact that the first weekend in March, I had a really stupid, freak fall. Chasing a bolting dog (not one of ours!) in the middle of the night, I caught my foot on our flagstone walk and slammed headfirst into this:

our very pretty to look at but not exactly resilient antique wrought-iron gate, resulting in a very banged up knee and an even more banged up head.

And that resulted in lots of appointments, etc., etc., etc. Not to worry, I'm lots better now on all fronts, but that and other family things and household things have made it very hard to keep a regular schedule, and if I don't have a regular schedule, I don't cope, I don't WRITE, and I get very overwhelmed and frustrated.

Fast forward to the other night. At dinner we were watching a YouTube video by Casey Neistat, an incredibly popular film maker and vlogger we follow .

Casey is very quirky, very talented, very funny, and often he gets life-related things bang on. In this video, he describes himself as having a condition: CALENDAR ANOREXIA. He defines that as an inability to put anything on his calendar that takes away from his creative time or his family time.

Sometimes I need a big reminder to

and this was it. I visualized every day of my calendar filled with big red Xs. I cleared everything but a dentist appointment and a haircut for the next few weeks, and I thought about all the things I really want to be doing with every minute of my time. Because it's precious.

WRITING
Reading
Writing in my journal
Enjoying my spring garden
and, um, maybe catching up on about six weeks worth of laundry, although that's more a must than a want. We'll see if I can stick to it.

What about you, REDS and readers? How do keep your days free of clutter so that you can concentrate on things that really matter?